Why Climb?

Lhasa at last. Flight delays out of Kathmandu have held up the 2007 Himalayan Experience (Himex) Everest climbing team, but now they’re in the fabled city of Lhasa, acclimatizing to the high Tibetan Plateau before heading by bus to base camp.

Expedition leader Russell Brice, along with his Sherpa staff, are driving a fleet of trucks overland from Nepal to establish base camp for our team of 13 climbers, four lead guides and 13 Discovery Channel TV crew members. It will take an operation numbering about 100 people for this team to climb Everest.

My role this year is as a reporter for Discovery.com. Back in 1995, I made a successful ascent of Everest’s North Ridge as a member of another Russell Brice expedition. I’ve still got that summit moment logged in my mind, and I can feel the emotions and trepidations of the members of the 2007 team as they zero in on the mountain. I won’t climb to the summit this time, but I will log the progress of the expedition as it evolves.

The team is a diverse group from seven countries - America, Britain, Denmark, Japan, Lithuania, Switzerland, Norway and China. Some are seasoned mountaineers; others are newcomers to mountain climbing; some have tried Everest in the past - one has even summited before. Whatever their experience, they’re driven people, drawn to Everest for very personal reasons. It will take time before they know each other - and for me to know them.

Take Tim Medvetz - or "Big Tim" as the 240-pound, Harley-riding Los Angelino is known. Last night over a dinner of yak steaks at the Snow Land Restaurant, Tim, a storyteller par excellence, recounted in a booming voice the painful past he surmounted to get to Everest.

The journey began with a high-speed motorcycle crash in 2001 and a bout of surgeries to reconstruct a mangled foot, install a titanium cage around his lower spine, and put metal plates in his head.

"I remember waking up in the hospital, slowly focusing on doctors and nurses standing with their backs to me. I wondered why they were ignoring me and then I looked at the [TV] screen and saw the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center falling down" he said.

Recovery was a long road, but Tim bought another Harley as soon as he got out of the hospital and rode it wearing a brace to protect his back and with a crutch secured to the fuel tank with a bungie cord.

His desire to climb Everest erupted out of the dark days of his recovery after reading Jon Krakauer’s seminal Everest account, Into Thin Air. He knew right away, he says, that it was either "sit on a couch in pain, popping pills and drinking whisky, or get off my butt and do something with my life."

A stint climbing mountains in South America and on small Nepalese peaks led Tim to sell everything – even his Harley - as a down payment on an Everest attempt. When he handed Russell Brice a backpack full of Nepalese rupees in 2006, he became a team member on the Himex North Ridge expedition chronicled in Discovery Channel’s 2006 series, Everest: Beyond the Limit.

Initially, Russell’s guides felt Tim was too heavy and unfit to climb the mountain and that his injuries left him too slow to be a summit contender. But late in the tragic and much-publicized 2006 season (11 people died on the mountain that year), he surprised everyone by reaching Camp 4 at 27,500 feet (8,400 meters) and then forcing himself up to about 100 yards from the summit. When he was forced to give up and descend, he had barely enough oxygen in his tank to get down safely and he was near his physical limit. Now he’s back, fitter and with a clearer idea of what the mountain will demand from him.

In the weeks ahead I hope to delve deeper into what drives Tim and his teammates, who, each in their own way, see Everest as a goal worth digging in to the very cores of their beings for.

Even though I've climbed Everest and a slew of other hard Himalayan peaks like K2, I don’t pretend to know the answer to the annoying question, "Why do you climb?" Maybe, by the end of this expedition and the blog that will grow out of it, I'll have a better idea of what it is that attracts people to the risks and rewards of climbing a mountain like Everest.

Signing off, Greg Child